Best nutty gift idea

This holiday season, skip boring old tea and scented candles and treat your loved one to their very own personalised coconut: sanded down, gloss-coated and sculpted into anything from an American football to the Virgin Mary. Just off Schöneberg’s Bayerischer Platz, behind a faux-Hawaiian window display, you’ll find Berlin’s first and only “coco-customiser” Wolfgang Krewe hard at work. “People walk past and think, ‘What the hell is he doing in there?’,” chuckles the owner of Cool Coconuts, an ex-actor who still gets recognised for his work on countless German TV procedural.

Photo by Pavel Mezihorák

Krewe opened his shop with his wife this April, after it grew from a hobby in his cellar to an obsession and left him swamped with online requests. Krewe paces up and down proudly, radiating a childlike enthusiasm as he shows off a coconut wedding ring gasket and a BDSM leather-bound coconut with metal studs. One customer has come to pick up his set of coconut billiard balls.

The coconuts themselves come either from Brazil, smuggled back by vacationing friends or Krewe himself; or from German supermarkets, though Krewe laments the inferior quality of the latter. Finished cocos vary from €45 to €165, a decent price if you consider that it takes Krewe an average of three weeks to make one. “There’s still a long way to go, you know,” he beams, his wife grinning beside him. “I have a lot of ideas still in my head.” Get your Christmas orders in quick, and don’t miss Wolfgang’s “Christmas Clash” – with Glühwein, Lebkuchen and more – on Dec 9 from 3pm.